It’s ironic. In the USA they freak out over the idea that someone might receive more unemployment than they are entitled to, but they will happily waste millions of dollars paying someone to do a shitty job.
It's also structured as a non-optional, government-ran insurance scheme predominantly funded through explicit payroll tax obligations[2], which employers aren't entitled to opt out of.
As long as you meet your states particular flavor of requirements, you're entitled to your unemployment insurance benefits. Despite any statements to the contrary states may push in their mandatory unemployment class.
[1] https://www.senate.gov/reference/glossary_term/entitlement.h...
[2] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-unemploym...
One could certainly argue that if this 'premium' didn't exist, it could be paid out in salaries.
With the coming wave of evictions that number is likely to soar. Things are going to get a lot worse before there's any opportunity to fix things.
> The fraudsters took advantage of states that were already struggling to process a flood of jobless claims amid the COVID-19 pandemic and related government shutdowns.
To me, this reads as a negative mark against the US federal government for denying the existence of the threat. Not a result of the aide programs themselves.
There isn’t an infinite amount of unemployment money available. If you allow fraud to run rampant in these systems, there is less money available for those who actually need it.
Enforcing rules and regulations is a good thing for everyone.
Furthermore, many people are earning more on the current USA unemployment system than they did from their original jobs. The system was designed to overpay some people for the sake of quickly delivering the system. (Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-gett... )
Who is "they"? I don't think anyone but corrupt politicians and their cronies are happy about wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. Certainly not the taxpayers.
Now the government has been broken so thoroughly that it no longer has the capacity to actually audit the private-sector work it contracts out.
That being said, at some point if you're cutting, or if you don't know where you're cutting, at some point you will hit bone. More money is not a panacea but neither is less.
To that end the government needs to attract, develop, and keep in-house talent, starting by actually offering competitive compensation.
The key phrase here is "same work." But I don't believe a small government should be doing the same work as a big government. It should be doing less work, have less responsibilities, and taking & wasting less of everyone's money.
If the government hired developers directly and promoted those developers to levels of seniority, it would in fact spend taxpayer dollars more efficiently than outsourcing to shitty consultants and contractors whose primary goal is to keep the same zombie contract going year after year.
The government at least has incentives to make the best product they can on a local level. There might be politicking at the higher up, but their goal is to make a product. The incentives for larger consulting companies is to make money and often does so at the cost of cutting corners or delivering broken products. The reason why they can get away with it is because the larger consulting companies operate at a different scale than smaller ones, which is often needed for major projects. Which means then you're forced to work with scumbag consulting companies.